#once

Nothing happens by itself... it all will come your way, once you understand that you have to make it come your way, by your own exertions. ↗

— Ben Stein

#exertions #happens #itself #make #nothing

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#accepted #against #beings #between #closest

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking. ↗

— Gertrude Stein

#climb #does #epoch #i #i can

You do anything for the person you love,” she said finally. "And then when you don’t think you can give any more of yourself, you do. You keep going. Because it would kill you not to. ↗

— Anna Carey

#once #love

Whenever you're done reading the chapter," he held uo his hands like take your time, "we'll start the concert." With a quick flip of my wrist I gave him the middle finger. He threw his head back and laughed. I looked up at Hawkins, who locked eyes with mine as he sang, "Love in an elevator, lovin' it up, til I hit the ground. ↗

— Leah Spiegel

#hawkins #joie #love

Once upon a time there was what there was, and if nothing had happened there would be nothing to tell. ↗

— Charles de Lint

#story #storytelling #dreams

Do they still hurt?" she whispered in anguished surprise. "No," Jason said tautly. Shame washed over him in sickening waves as he waited helplessly for her inevitable reaction to the stark evidence of his humiliation. To his utter disbelief he felt her arms encircle him from behind and the touch of her lips on his back. "How brave you must have been to endure this," she whispered achingly, "how strong to survive it and go on living..." When she began kissing each scar, Jason rolled to his side and jerked her into his arms. "I love you," he whispered agonizedly, plunging his hands into her luxuriant hair and turning her face up to his. "I love you so much... ↗

— Judith McNaught Once and Always

#lovers #once-and-always #passion #romance #love

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

He decides he wants both more or less. He’d like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other’s brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning. ↗

— Ben Fountain

#falling-in-love #love

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash. ↗

— Tim Wu

#humor #money #money